Chapter 10 Calliope #2
I shook my head. I wouldn’t be here alone and it was late for them to be up. “We’ll be back shortly. Could you take Oolong and Joe back though?”
“Of course,” my mom answered. She looked behind me and I knew that Starbucks had walked up. Mom moved around me to hug him. He was so big that his bending to hug her looked like he was trying to break her in two. “Thank you for looking out for our girl so well.”
“Always,” he vowed. “Do you want me to call a prospect to drive the two of you home? It’s late and very dark out.”
It was a cloudy and windy night, making the moon seem absent.
Dad, though, shook his head. “We’ll be fine. And I’m sure one of my kids or grandkids just so happens to be hanging around outside to follow us home.”
After another hug and kiss from both, I walked them to the door. “We’ll try to be quiet when we get home. Don’t wait up for us.”
I smelled something as I said the words.
Like antiseptic. I was not looking forward to how much cleaning Starbucks and I still needed to do.
It was going to be a long night and an early morning, but it would be worth it.
Plus, I could sleep in the car because I knew that Starbucks would carry me into the house. Bonus!
No sooner had I closed the door behind them did I hear a car backfire.
I jumped and flung the door open, but my parents were still walking to their car.
They weren’t even in it yet. As my dad had predicted, one of my nephews was sitting on the hood of his car, likely instructed to wait for his grandparents and follow them on the drive home.
“What is it?” Starbucks asked.
“The car backfiring. I heard it again. I think something’s wrong with their car.”
He lowered his head and kissed my hair. “Stay here and lock the door behind me. I’ll go check it out, but Grumpy swore their car was in near perfect condition.”
I started to get a sick, dreaded feeling in my gut. “Please,” I begged. “I think something’s wrong.”
“Lock the door,” he repeated before heading out into the night. Silly man wasn’t even wearing his jacket.
I stayed by the door to watch him run after my parents and our pets.
After a few minutes of watching them at my dad’s open hood, I decided I was doing no one any good just standing here, and I might as well get to cleaning so Starbucks and I could get home all the faster.
I took three steps away from the door before I remembered his directive, and went back to lock it.
I started with the trash. Making the besoms had been an awesome and fun activity, but a messy one. Twigs, petals, stems, and twine littered tabletops and the floor under the tables. I wished I’d thought ahead and brought a vacuum cleaner.
The tables themselves would be removed. I had only put them up to make the besom craft projects easier for customers. We would move them into the back for a prospect to pick up the next day. Or I guess, today since it was after midnight.
I was bone tired, but I also knew that I couldn’t open tomorrow morning with my shop looking like a tornado had hit it.
I was just regretting not accepting my family’s help to clean up.
But after the crowd and running around like a chicken with my head cut off, I wanted some alone time with Starbucks.
After sweeping up, I took the trash bag around the entire store to see if there was anything else littered about.
I found a few disposable cups around, but nothing much.
Also found a credit card in one of the seat cushions and a partially licked lollipop stuck to the back of a chair. Ew. People were nasty.
I tied off the trash bag and was about to step into the back when Starbucks opened the door again. I paused. He looked a little chilled, but not concerned.
“What happened?” I demanded, putting the large trash bag down.
He shrugged. “I’m not a mechanic, but I know enough to pass for one. I couldn’t find anything wrong, Winnie. I gave your nephew… What was his name?”
“Thyme, but everyone calls him T.”
“Right. Our kids, by the way, are not being named after herbs and spices,” he proclaimed. “Anyway, I gave T my number in case something happened.”
I liked when he talked of our kids, like it was a done deal. But even that couldn’t make me feel better right now. That feeling of dread was still churning in my stomach like a witch’s brew. “Thank you for checking. You should have grabbed your coat first.”
Starbucks waved my concern off. “I’m fine, Winnie. Now, what do you need me to work on first?”
“I was just about to take the trash out back—”
“Let me do that.”
“No,” I insisted. “You just came in from the cold. I know you’re a big, strong macho-man but I don’t want you getting sick.”
“You shouldn’t go out into the back alley alone at night,” he argued.
He may have a point there. “Fine. I’ll put it by the backdoor and we’ll take it out when we leave so neither one of us has to go back out into the cold more than we need to.”
Starbucks seemed amenable to this. “Where do you need me to start?”
“Can you wipe down the shelves? I need to see what I have in the back to restock and make a list of what we need to bring with us from home tomorrow morning.”
He gave me a salute. “Sure thing, boss.”
I smiled at him, which did not lessen that dreaded feel in my gut. “I like the sound of that. ‘Boss’. You don’t mind answering to me here?”
“Why would I?” he asked back. “I’m the boss in the bedroom and you don’t complain.”
My cheeks heated at the reminder. He was very bossy in the bedroom, and fuck me, because I loved every second of it. “Touché.” I picked up the top of the large trash bag again. “I’ll be right back.”
I stepped into the storage room. I had a wide path between the door to my shop and the backdoor that led into the open alley.
I needed to get utility shelves to help organize back here, but since customers didn’t see it, it hadn’t been a priority so far.
Boxes were stacked in piles, and after it took me too many failed tries to locate more candles tonight, I had plans to label all of them with a big, black marker tomorrow.
I wondered if it would be pushing my luck this early on to ask Starbucks if I could borrow one of the prospects to build some more shelves next week. Then again, I needed to buy said shelves before I could schedule to have someone set them up for me.
As soon as the door swung closed behind me, I heard the echo of the car backfiring again. I jumped, but of course, there was no car in the storage room. I sent out a prayer to the universe that my parents were safe. The fact that Thyme was following them home made me feel a lot better.
I wasn’t even sure what caused a car to backfire. Could it even happen if the car was already in motion? Home was only ten minutes away, so it wouldn’t be long before I would know for sure that they’d made it safely.
I dragged the large trash bag to the backdoor. True to my word, I did not venture outside to place it in the dumpster.
Turning around, I froze. A man stood in the center of my storage room. A man who was not Starbucks. A man with a gun in his hand.
Fear gripped me. It took a lot to be able to sneak up on me. I knew for a fact that I’d never met this man before.
I didn’t know a lot about guns. Probably knew less about them than I did about cars.
But I did know it was not a good sign when the person holding a gun on you had his finger over the trigger.
I think the gun was a revolver or maybe a pistol.
It had one of those turnstiles like in the old Looney Tunes cartoons, which was probably not good when that was the extent of my gun knowledge.
“Call him back here.”
The pop! of a car backfiring was so loud in my ears that I nearly missed the man’s order. Call him back here? Who? Starbucks?
As I stared into the man’s cold eyes, I wondered how I’d been caught so off guard.
If I’d been in danger, if a member of my family or Starbucks, had been in danger, I should know about it.
I would have gotten a full vision like I had before my sister and Dosia’s mom, Stella, had died in her car accident.
I was no longer a child who didn’t understand what she was seeing.
I was an adult, a Third Degree Wiccan, who knew how to interpret my visions.
I should have seen this coming.
But the man in front of me was, for lack of a better description, a magical dud.
A psychic null. Either through a natural shield or maybe a medication he was on, magic couldn’t touch him.
Which meant I couldn’t sense him, and I couldn’t have seen him coming.
I’d heard of people like him before, but I’d never met one.
Skeptics, sure, but not someone who was blocked from my powers.
He took a menacing step towards me, arching his arm up awkwardly to make the gun point more at a downward angle than straight at me. “I said,” he ordered through gritted teeth. “Call. Him. Back. Here.”
I might not be able to read this man using my powers, but I could read intent. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if I called Starbucks back here, this man, this stranger, would kill him.
I was terrified. My breathing was ragged, my thoughts were jumbled, my hands were sweaty… But my spine? My spine was made of steel.
I stared down the barrel of a gun and shook my head. “No.”
Shock crossed his face before he shook it off. “The fuck you say, bitch? I said to call him back here!”
I didn’t think I had it in me to shake my head again. My neck felt weak, like if I moved too much, my head might just roll off my shoulders. It made my words clipped as I had to force my jaw to work. “No.”
I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I called Starbucks back here and it got him shot. He could die. There was little to no sanity in the eyes of the man in front of me. His deadly intentions were clear in the weapon he held.
I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know his connection to Starbucks. I didn’t know if he actually had it in him to pull the trigger. The only thing I did know was that I was willing to die to save the man I loved.
Maybe this was my penance. Maybe my parents had been right, and what I’d done had left the world in such imbalance that this was the price I had to pay. I’d ignored my visions. I’d gone against the future Fate had intended. I set not only my life, but also Starbucks’, on an entirely different path.
Four days. That’s all I’d gotten before the universe set things to rights. They were the best four days of my life, and if that was all I got, then I was fine with it. I wanted more. I wanted lifetimes.
I didn’t have a death wish. I wanted to live.
I wanted to have my wedding day and experience pregnancy.
I wanted to see my parents again. They’d already lost one child, and now my actions might cause them to lose another.
I wanted more than anything to see Starbucks again.
I wanted to tell him that I loved him, that I regretted nothing.
The need to call to him, to have him rescue me and save the day, was strong.
He was going to be so pissed at me. I remembered the day he’d come to my store for the auction labor hours and how angry he was that my front door hadn’t been locked.
That had been a deadbolt. This was a man with a gun.
But I’d take his anger with me to the grave if it meant he got to live.
“Crazy whore!” He came at me again, faster this time. “If you won’t yell out to him, then I’ll make you scream!”
I was so terrified, my bones locked into place, that I didn’t see the pistol whip coming. Agony seared my jaw as the metal of the weapon connected with my face.
I flew backwards, hitting the concrete floor hard. But I would not go down without a fight. The moment I felt his weight on top of me, my body thawed. I wanted no man on top of me but Starbucks.
I used my nails like cat claws to dig into his face.
He yelled out in pain, and a second later, his hands went around my throat.
I gagged and gasped as my air was cut off.
It wasn’t just my throat too. He was sitting fully on my chest, pressing on my ribs and lungs.
This man wasn’t large with muscle like Starbucks, but he still had a good amount of weight on me.
I hit, I punched, I clawed, but it was no use.
My foot collided with something and there was a loud crash. I felt something on my leg, but I was too concerned with trying to breathe to decipher what it was.
A loud roar echoed through the room and suddenly the pressing weight on my chest and throat was gone. I coughed, but it was no use. I still couldn’t breathe. I tried to suck in air, but it was like it got caught in my mouth, unable to go down my throat.
Blackness filled my vision. The last thing I heard was the sound of the gun going off, and I knew my mistake immediately. It hadn’t been a car backfiring I’d been hearing all week.
It had been a gunshot.